No Arabic abstract
We show that for a quantum system coupled to both vibrational and electromagnetic environments, enforcing additivity of their combined influences results in non-equilibrium dynamics that does not respect the Franck-Condon principle. We overcome this shortcoming by employing a collective coordinate representation of the vibrational environment, which permits the derivation of a non-additive master equation. When applied to a two-level emitter our treatment predicts decreasing photon emission rates with increasing vibrational coupling, consistent with Franck-Condon physics. In contrast, the additive approximation predicts the emission rate to be completely insensitive to vibrations. We find that non-additivity also plays a key role in the stationary non-equilibrium model behaviour, enabling two-level population inversion under incoherent electromagnetic excitation.
We study the quantum transitions of a central spin surrounded by a collective-spin environment. It is found that the influence of the environmental spins on the absorption spectrum of the central spin can be explained with the analog of the Franck-Condon (FC) effect in conventional electron-phonon interaction system. Here, the collective spins of the environment behave as the vibrational mode, which makes the electron to be transitioned mainly with the so-called vertical transitions in the conventional FC effect. The vertical transition for the central spin in the spin environment manifests as, the certain collective spin states of the environment is favored, which corresponds to the minimal change in the average of the total spin angular momentum.
A tremendous amount of recent attention has focused on characterizing the dynamical properties of periodically driven many-body systems. Here, we use a novel numerical tool termed `density matrix truncation (DMT) to investigate the late-time dynamics of large-scale Floquet systems. We find that DMT accurately captures two essential pieces of Floquet physics, namely, prethermalization and late-time heating to infinite temperature. Moreover, by implementing a spatially inhomogeneous drive, we demonstrate that an interplay between Floquet heating and diffusive transport is crucial to understanding the systems dynamics. Finally, we show that DMT also provides a powerful method for quantitatively capturing the emergence of hydrodynamics in static (un-driven) Hamiltonians; in particular, by simulating the dynamics of generic, large-scale quantum spin chains (up to L = 100), we are able to directly extract the energy diffusion coefficient.
Understanding out-of-equilibrium quantum dynamics is a critical outstanding problem, with key questions regarding characterizing adiabaticity for applications in quantum technologies. We show how the metric-space approach to quantum mechanics naturally characterizes regimes of quantum dynamics, and provides an appealingly visual tool for assessing their degree of adiabaticity. Further, the dynamic trajectories of quantum systems in metric space suggest a lack of ergodicity, thus providing a better understanding of the fundamental one-to-one mapping between densities and wavefunctions.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of quantum optimal control techniques in harnessing irreversibility generated by non-equilibrium processes, implemented in unitarily evolving quantum many-body systems. We address the dynamics of a finite-size quantum Ising model subjected to finite-time transformations, which unavoidably generate irreversibility. We show that work can be generated through such transformation by means of optimal controlled quenches, while quenching the degree of irreversibility to very low values, thus boosting the efficiency of the process and paving the way to a fully controllable non-equilibrium thermodynamics of quantum processes.
Models based on non-Hermitian Hamiltonians can exhibit a range of surprising and potentially useful phenomena. Physical realizations typically involve couplings to sources of incoherent gain and loss; this is problematic in quantum settings, because of the unavoidable fluctuations associated with this dissipation. Here, we present several routes for obtaining unconditional non-Hermitian dynamics in non-dissipative quantum systems. We exploit the fact that quadratic bosonic Hamiltonians that do not conserve particle number give rise to non-Hermitian dynamical matrices. We discuss the nature of these mappings from non-Hermitian to Hermitian Hamiltonians, and explore applications to quantum sensing, entanglement dynamics and topological band theory. The systems we discuss could be realized in a variety of photonic and phononic platforms using the ubiquitous resource of parametric driving.